By SEAN AXMAKER, SPECIAL TO THE P-I

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, November 6, 2008

There's nothing but the best of intentions in Mark Herman's Holocaust film, an attempt to see the horror through the uncomprehending eyes of a child.

In "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," adapted from the novel by John Boyne, 8-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is the son of an SS officer (David Thewlis as a thoroughly efficient and loyal Nazi) assigned to a concentration camp in an isolated countryside.

With no playmates nearby, Bruno sneaks out of the yard to the nearby "farm," where people dressed in soiled striped pajamas toil behind an electrified fence. He strikes up a friendship with Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a gaunt but curious boy his own age who hides out by the fence.

The use of a British cast (or at least British accents, in the case of mom Vera Farmiga) for the German family gives the film a feeling that is both warmly familiar -- the period British drama in the cocoon of upper-class privilege -- and skewed with alien details -- the swastika flags, the SS insignias, the "Heil Hitler" salutes. The sense of normalcy slowly cracks under the fatal reality represented by those details.

It's a lesson film, and there's nothing wrong with that. The history of the Holocaust needs to be revisited every generation. It's a simplistic perspective and a purely emotional response, but there is something quite powerful in seeing it through the eyes of a naive observer who cannot comprehend the truth of a concentration camp because it is simply too inhuman to imagine.

But it's also troubling the way Herman privileges Bruno's experience over that of Shmuel and the nameless prisoners in the camp, by virtue of this emotional identification. By the climax, which will tie your stomach in knots, Herman has turned Bruno into the innocent caught up in the nightmare and Jews into extras in his story.

That's not the point Herman is trying make, of course, but it's the inadvertent, appalling outcome of his storytelling. Herman's intentions are admirable, but his results are unsettling in the worst ways.